Solid state nonvolatile storage (e.g., semiconductor circuit based memory cells) continues to improve in performance while dropping in price. Solid state drives (SSDs) now have comparable price points to rotating magnetic disk storage for similar capacities, which continues to expand the penetration of SSDs. Even so, designers continue to make performance improvements in SSD architectures and implementations. SSDs traditionally have memory cells organized as “planes,” which refer to resources grouped together and addressed together. Multiple planes enables multiple resources to be accessed in parallel within the SSD.
The push for increasing performance and storage capacity in SSDs has driven an increase in the number of planes of memory cells. It is understood that hardware interfaces to the storage resources provide improved performance over software-based or firmware-based interfaces. However, changes in nonvolatile media, and in particular to the hardware organization of the storage resources into more planes, traditionally requires a corresponding change in the nonvolatile storage controller. Traditionally, manufacturers design a new controller for each new generation of nonvolatile media. However, design and build of the controller tends to require more time than making hardware changes to the nonvolatile media. When the controller is custom-designed for each iteration of nonvolatile media hardware changes, the controller tends to be a bottleneck in product release.
Descriptions of certain details and implementations follow, including a description of the figures, which may depict some or all of the embodiments described below, as well as discussing other potential embodiments or implementations of the inventive concepts presented herein.